On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 07:15:06AM -0800, Michael Pelz Sherman wrote regarding why no automatic conversion in string concatenation?: > > As a Java & PHP developer, I find it kind of annoying that I have to > explicitly convert non-string variables to strings when concatenating > them, especially when python is quite capable of doing the conversion > automatically. > i.e.: > >>> myBool = True > >>> print myBool > True > >>> print "myBool is " + myBool > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> > TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'bool' objects > >>> print "myBool is " + str(myBool) > myBool is True > Can anyone explain why this is so?
Because python doesn't know if '1' + 1 should equal 2 or '11' and would rather you mad that decision. Should it be different than 1 + '1'? or to put it more succinctly, because "explicit is better than implicit." In fact, I think it's more often the case that I have string data that I need to treat as integers than the other way around (input from stdin and textfiles for example). > Are there any plans to change this > in python 3000? I hope not, and I don't think so. > Thanks, > - Michael No problem. Cheers, Cliff -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
